


the water will only rise

by astrid (alharper)



Series: Magpie [2]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universes, F/M, Incest, Other, Sibling Incest, rule 63!illidan, someone's dead but they'll get better later dw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 05:36:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14928128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alharper/pseuds/astrid
Summary: “Illidan,” he says, voice harsh, and her eyes are darting out, down and away, taking in the dappled sunlight and elm forests.“Illidarei,” she corrects him, “tell me, brother not quite mine, where have I found myself?”





	the water will only rise

“It’s not a _rift_ ,” Khadgar hedges. He waves a hand through the shimmering air, and the shimmer eddies, clings to his hand for a scant moment before bleeding slowly back into place.

“It’s more like... a weakening. The fabric of the world has never been absolute, but when it was ripped out and resealed without a physical portal, it pulled it too tight, creating weak points elsewhere. So where it’s supposed to be somewhat permeable, it’s completely porous, and magic users are falling through these holes from their own universes when they pass too close through the twisting nether.”

His hands and face are more animated as he goes on, filled with all the inappropriate enthusiasm that makes Tyrande impatient with mages, and her absence sits like a stone in Malfurion’s chest, dragging him down.

There’s more to it, unstated - the ragged remains of the Kirin Tor cannot do it alone, are spread too thin and becoming increasingly too scarce to risk alone on three separate points in the world that could spontaneously cough up Medivh, or Kael’thas, or Cho’gall, just as easily as the tired Jaina and baby-faced Khadgar they have seen thus far. That this is yet another in a long line of awful wounds in a world falling apart beneath the careless fists of the Iron Horde.

“I will help you guard this place,” Malfurion says, and Khadgar’s tired face, prematurely aged, is so openly grateful that he turns away from it, “It is the least I can do; already I cost you resources you can ill afford.”

‘Resources’. Malfurion had brushed out her hair, wiped the dark oil of bowstrings from her fingers, and lain her down; still as sleep, still as death, his heart lies held in arcane stasis deep in the guts of Dalaran.

“We love her too,” Khadgar says, gentle, somber. But they take their leave shortly after, and Malfurion stays behind, feels as old as the worn stones of the abandoned old outpost he is now stationed in, deep in the heart of pale human forests.

*

He doesn’t see someone every day. It takes four weeks for him to reach double figures, but the rush of a portal rustles his feathers every time, and the eleventh person to step through he has the faint feeling he _should_ recognise, but doesn’t - a young night elf woman, not a day past a millenia, if he’s not mistaken; hair the deep blueish black of midnight spill just over broad shoulders, float into a dark halo of static around sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw. Her eyes are large in her face, arresting and intense when they meet his, golden amber.

She takes his measure very slowly - it has been a long time since any woman not his wife has been so _blatant_ about it, and it stirs something in him, warm and dry as desert sand - before she says in a voice thick as honey, golden as her eyes, “dearest brother, you _do_ grow up nicely,” and he’s cold down to the marrow.

“Illidan,” he says, voice harsh, and her eyes are darting out, down and away, taking in the dappled sunlight and elm forests.

“Illidarei,” she corrects him, “tell me, brother not quite mine, where have I found myself?”

He thinks, in the beginning, that she’s even brattier than his version had been, but it’s just the halo of time on his memory softening edges which are less ‘sharp’ than they are ‘bristling with needles’. In the time she is there, they meet two more Illidan’s, like she’s broken some sort of dam and they’re all spilling through to meet him now. They’re both young, still prior to the Well, as though the twisting nether can feel his fragility and is being careful of it. They also leave quickly - no version of Illidan likes any other version of Illidan, so far.

Although one _did_ try to pick himself up using the same smouldering, measured up and down that she had treated him to, and was put down with such razor-wire efficiency that Malfurion folds the memory away carefully, so it isn’t lost under the immediate rush of hot, heavy fear that he may not get a chance to tell Tyrande, see the sly way she bites her lip when something is a little meaner than she quite wants to admit to finding funny.

It’s better and worse, dealing with an Illidan so much younger than he is with an extra eon of patience between them.

His mind has always been slower than Illidan’s, taking longer to come to better conclusions, but even Illidan had slowed down with time from the impossible lightning-flash jumps of his youthful mind from topic to topic, ten times faster than anybody could hope to follow, and three times as impatient at this age when they don’t, when _Malfurion_ doesn’t. But he can also see the edges of a crippling vulnerability behind those flashes of nastiness now, the fault line deep in her personality, where Xavius will sink in clawed fingers and tear her soul apart.

He tries to talk to her about it, but she won’t hear anything from him, declares him “my dear brother, but not _my_ dear brother”. And she’s right - they’re not identical, even though the broad strokes and honestly almost all of the details are the same. His expressions tended towards sneers, and hers are more… smirks. Still snide, still pleased with herself, but a touch of amusement, probably lent by the slightly different shape of her face rather than any real difference in attitude. There’s a strange, physical edge to this version, as well, that was never there before - she runs fingers along the soft fuzz of his antlers, traces the gently glowing marks on his shoulder, fusses endlessly with the feathers that sprout from his arms to line them up, perfectly flat. He knows he should tell her to stop, but every time he opens his mouth that vulnerability glimmers out at him, and somehow it feels as though acknowledging it will make it worse, will give form to the rapidly building charge. And so he watches her silently, lets her do as she will, until when she presses a glancing kiss to his mouth, he doesn’t correct that either.

They still fight - or, she still is nasty, and keeps at him until anger slowly, slowly rises despite himself, but it’s a lot more satisfying, getting angry with her, when instead of a dozen sharp little cuts before slipping off into the night to leave him alone with his exasperation, it now ends with her gasping against a hand shoved hard against her mouth to keep her quiet, rutting frantically against as many fingers as he’ll allow, a carefully turned thumb. Thrusting easily in and out as she gets wetter, savage satisfaction in the way she whimpers into one hand while caught up in the rhythm of the other, and he’ll slow it down just before she clears the edge so her entire body is trembling against him, beneath him, golden eyes wide and beautiful as always under a sheen of unfocused lust.

As it turns out, the best way - maybe the _only_ way - to wipe that smugness from her face is to fuck it out of her, edgy and just a little bit mean.

She has never been patient, but Illidan’s failings have never been his, so in this he forces patience on her as he learns the trick to turning her about in his hands, finding just where to tap to crack her wide open, begging and grasping, her fingers and her cunt as greedy as her eyes have always been, in every form.

And when he finally does she wails, arches with almost enough force to move him, and he extracts useless promises while he can. They’re empty, he knows they’re empty, but it’s so satisfying, hearing her whimper that she’ll be good, _oh, I’ll, I’ll be, oh I promise, please, I’ll be so good, furion, so good, for you, please, please_ until legs clamp iron around his waist and she’s begging with only his name, higher and higher, dizzy and frantic to the sobbing release that he finally lets her find, again and again between the hard drive of his cock and his hand.

He had figured on the smoothing of some of her edges, fetched up against the unquestionable and unwavering truth of his attention, but doesn’t account for how much it would soften _him_ to _her_ ; for all his many years of life he doesn’t have the points of comparison, not really, to know. How easily he becomes turned by her delight, how indulgent of her foibles, already so well worn and intimately known even before they had met. How the warmth of her hand tucked into his elbow becomes almost enough to excuse her the endless sharpness of her tongue.

She stays for three more weeks before he rises to find her standing before the bright, shimmering air, still as he’s ever seen any version of her. It’s getting worse; mages appear faster now, like every person who passes through wears at it just a little bit more.

“It chafes at me,” she says as he approaches; she can’t seem to take her eyes off it. “I was never a priest, but I can see the Light through it, I can hear the Void, calling to me. I have to leave, ‘Furion, before it chafes the heart right out of me. I won’t be one of your brothers, grasping at power and failing.”

She looks at him, her eyes dark, completely blank.

“Goodbye, my oldest and best loved brother,” she says, and a portal swirls her away.

He hadn’t accounted for how much better they would be, but neither had he accounted for how much _worse_ , as she is replaced by version after version, barbed and sharp and endlessly, ceaselessly cruel.

The ones who look like his brother he can almost stomach, old dirge still deep in his gut, younger than he is but most of them old enough to be just as sad. And almost all of them ask after Tyrande, a ceaseless litany of blows. He lies, goes through seven more brothers, two more sisters (who are also his brother), all of whom leave immediately, before hitting on one who doesn’t.

This one has drunk of the skull of Gul’dan; his brother became far less attuned to the arcane, after that, and so they are much rarer, this only the second he has seen. He finds her running clawed fingers through the glowing miasma of the leaking world, face wondering but hard-edged with time, and she turns proud and terrible when he calls to her, corrects him; _Illidaene_. She wears her hair in that same topknot, glowing fel hidden behind the same blindfold, and while the exact distribution of hard muscle is a little different, the swell of her hips a little softer, he could never have mistaken her for anyone else, even if he hadn’t met sisters before, even if he’d met a thousand Illidari. Maybe it’s that similarity that makes him tell her the truth, to admit to the horror of his beautiful, clever wife, delicate lace between her soft skin and the cold carved marble of a slab made to hold relics, the arrow of a dead but still living ranger piercing her heart. She makes a single, devastated noise, ripped deep from her gut. Her face shatters, falls apart. She stays.

She is not the same not-Illidan he had taken to bed, but the careful build-up and accompanying self deception are absent, out of reach, for both of them. They don’t really talk, unlike the last who had stayed, unlike even the ones who wait an hour before leaving - they move silently around each other, within reach without touching, for the first five days she is there, with scarcely a word between them.

Perhaps she reads something in him, or perhaps she simply takes a chance, but she slips rogue-like into his suite on the evening of the sixth, peels her shirt off over her head even as he is looking up in surprise. Cups her breasts in her hands in a twisted sort of supplication, thumbs at black nipples hardening beneath his gaze, there’s a terrible edge of anger to her, raw and exposed as the day Tyrande pulled her from beneath Mt Hyjal.

But her voice is rough, smoky with more than fel, and she says:

“Dearest brother, must I fuck _myself_ , waiting for you?”

So they bite into each others’ mouths, indulgent aggression and a struggle that goes to the floor; those strange, coltish goat-legs turning awkwardly against his, furred and warm and surprisingly soft. They fight with each other even as their goals are the same, shred the waist of her pants and rip it down, just enough that he can get the head of his cock against her, a hand hard around her breast and fangs near her throat, and she shoves herself just as savagely back onto him - they’re out of pace, too angry to find that rhythm together, ancient bitterness pressing down, between and against and around them. She snarls, hooves spark on the floor as she tries to find leverage to twist against him, and he denies her purely for the sake of it.

But she was already wet by the time his hands were on her, _ready,_ and he wonders, sudden as hail in the summer - if he had listened, would he have heard her hooves on stone, walking the halls? Working herself up to coming into the suite? Do her wings flutter absently when she paces, like his brothers’? Do they give her away - just a little, if you’re looking - if you know _how_ to look? As Tyrande had known, and taught him, always hard to his brother’s face but softer to his back where he couldn’t see, couldn’t take it to mean more than it did.

They’re folded now, high against her back to avoid getting caught on anything, and he gives up the nasty, shallow thrusting to stand. She makes a sullen, angry noise as his cock drags free, but he pulls her up with him, hands rough around her arms but still softer than they had been. He backs her up against the door, and she lets him.

It’s difficult to read expression with her eyes hidden and gone, but there’s something bitter still around her mouth, so he kisses her, long and firm and open-mouthed, grasps her ass firmly and drags languid fingers firm against her entrance, until she wraps an arm around him and is moving in spite of herself, trying to guide his fingers inside, bitterness driven out or at the least hidden beneath lust. He turns her to the wall before he lets his fingers penetrate her, and uses the two already hooked inside of her to help guide his cock into place beside them, slowly and then all at once; she squawks, shock and then satisfaction. He doesn’t laugh at it, though he wants to, knows she would take it badly.

He has to lean his other hand against the wall by hers, to keep balance at the force and feeling of it, and she twitches her hand close to his. Her smallest finger catches over his thumb - her hands are larger than that last female counterpoint had been, but still not as large as his own brothers’; she doesn’t move it, a tiny point of contact that feels somehow more important than the long hot line of her back against his front. The fel changes have given her, amongst other things, the extra height needed to be comfortable this way, and he finds himself wanting to stay just so, close as they have scarcely been since birth, curled easy as commas around her.

He thumbs open the folds at the at the peak of her cunt and strokes gently, carefully, starts with small touches that make her shiver around him, grows firm only as she rocks forward into it, builds her up at a slow, careful pace so that when she comes it’s with her mouth open and gasping, almost a rictus; it’s with tears track down her face, tinted that same ever-present fel green, and he mouths nothing against her ear as she convulses, soft, sweet.

She’s a little weaker, after, movements sloppy, rests her head sleepily on her arms against the wall and he could do anything to her like this, fucked pliant, and that grim satisfaction is back deep in his chest, chasing out the last traces of dark anger with her earlier presumption.

He pulls out his fingers but leaves his hand there, sets a harder pace - it will take him longer, in this position, but that gives them the time he’s looking for. Her wings spread slowly, a little at the time, a stabilising force he has to adjust to, around, but finally she’s huffing out the occasional little noise and starts lazily riding against him again, lifts an arm above her head to grasp at his shoulder for balance, arches in a sinuous line with the other hand pressed over his, directing pressure just as she wants it, rides another wave to whimpering orgasm even as he finds his own pleasure in her body, and when he pulls his softening cock from her she _sighs_ , a tiny noise he doesn't think she meant to make, and her wings flutter, just a little, as he’s looking, and that's satisfying, too.

She’s uncoordinated, and when he moves away she stumbles a little, wings snapping back put on instinct, one wingtip scraping harshly against the wood of the door. She makes a small noise, abortive but pained, and the second time the flutter awkwardly Malfurion just sweeps her into his arms where she goes lax against his chest, green glow fading out as she closes her eyes. She’s heavy, still as sleep, still as death. His heart has fallen out of him, back into her hands, caged in sharp black claws no more or less cruel than ever they’ve been.

The grief for his brother is _jagged_ , sharp as it has been every day for eons. For all he’s put it down again and again, the water of time has done nothing to wear it smooth.

“You were supposed to love _me_ best,” she whispers, plaintive and half-asleep, “you were both supposed to love me best, but nobody does.”

“My beautiful, mercury twin,” he says, resigned and so immensely, impossibly sad, “you were supposed to love me at all.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_you always dirty up the windows_  
_if you keep them at bay_  
_that way no one's gonna surprise you by getting too close_  
_anybody but me though_  
_you've made exceptions to your rules_  
_and now we're staring down truth neither one of us wants to know_


End file.
